


Where The Heart Is

by Tousled_Sky



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Capture, Gen, War Criminals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 16:35:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9193658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tousled_Sky/pseuds/Tousled_Sky
Summary: "Everything is covered in diamonds. The design is tiled into the floor, bricked into the walls, painted across the ceilings. Even the arches seem angular. It's as if someone removed three of the four suits from card decks, using only diamonds to build the card castle that Sapphire stands within now." The Crystal Gems are captured and tried for treason on Homeworld.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking about the ending of Dances With Wolves, where Dances is (Spoilers!) captured by the US Military as a traitor. It seemed so weird - like that life he used to have had no bearing anymore, replaced with the new life he had with the Native Americans. I thought "I bet it would be the same for Garnet if she ever got captured". And thus, this fanfiction. This'll probably get a second chapter. I hope you enjoy this, loves.

Everything is covered in diamonds.

The design is tiled into the floor, bricked into the walls, painted across the ceilings. Even the arches seem angular. It's as if someone removed three of the four suits from card decks, using only diamonds to build the card castle that Sapphire stands within now.

It makes her angry, like she's being oppressed by the imagery. She wishes she had her star design on her gown; a way to show some small measure of defiance, however superficial. It wouldn't do her much good, but she wants to fight this fate in any way she can. However, she never bothered to put a star on her dress - she had never needed one when she was just Sapphire on Earth, because she had rarely been just Sapphire on Earth.

She misses Ruby.

She misses Garnet.

She doesn't miss Garnet in the way a parent misses a child who was kidnapped or lost, or the way a boyfriend / girlfriend misses an ex who still sometimes replies to messages - painful, but with anxious, fluttering hope that they may return. She misses Garnet in the way a person misses their friend as they stand by their grave - grief that's heavy and unchangeable. There's no hope for Garnet that she can see - when she looks into the future, looks down each and every branch in the stream that she rides down in this boat called life - she can't see Garnet.

But that's no surprise at this point. She's known it since the attack on the base - when the second ship landed and the huge Homeworld quartzs strode across the sand, up to the house. The moment before Garnet was hit with the gem destabilizer and felt her form liquidate, the two gems falling to the sand to lie next to one another - in Garnet's last moment, she could see, clearly, that it was over.

This wasn't a path Sapphire had ever thought would come to fruition. Garnet had known this was a possibility, but she had never really thought it was a viable one. Just as humans know, distantly, that a huge meteor may crash into the Earth and cause another mass extinction. Yet they don't spend each day as if the next may be the apocalypse. It doesn't seem like it could ever really happen.

But it has, already. The meteor which shook the Earth and sent ash into the air that killed all of the dinosaurs was just as real as they come; even if it was such a long, long time ago. But if it happened back then, why not now?

In the same way, Sapphire thought that the past she had left behind such a long, long time ago could never catch up to her.

But here she was, on a planet that she had only seen as a distant dream in the night sky for millennia now. Walking through a life she had laid to rest and made peace with. It feels strange, like she's lingering in a place that had nothing left for her - like walking the halls of an empty home when the car's waiting outside, packed for moving. Familiar, but finished.

She finished her life here long ago. However, this life evidently decided it wasn't finished with her.

The trial is strange. She's uncomfortable and frightened and angry, but feels strangely detached from it, with no guilt - as if she's being blamed for some wrong she never committed. Certainly, nothing about the life she's been living seems wrong to her - just her and Ruby making something, some _one_ entirely new, and beautiful, and made of love. What could be wrong about such a wonderful thing?

According to the diamonds, everything. And it's not just about the fusion; no. She _fled_. She's a _traitor_ , a _deserter_.

Even with the heavy weight and the ugliness of the words; even with their _truth_ , she still doesn't feel guilty in the least. Just because the diamonds are the ones in power doesn't mean they're right. She spent her life on Earth doing what she truly believed was right - not following orders blindly, but keeping her planet safe.

She wonders how Earth is. She hopes it's alright -that Lapis, the sole survivor of the attack, somehow is managing to keep their home safe. When the barn was attacked after the house raid, Lapis had taken off into the air. Peridot, on the ground, had recounted that the last thing she'd seen before being poofed was Lapis diving for her, face distressed and arms outstretched, trying to scoop her up and take to the skies beyond the reach of the soldiers.

But before she could reach Peridot, she was a small green stone closed in a quartz's fist. Sapphire assumes, hopes, prays, that Lapis escaped, and finds some comfort when she realizes she really trusts that Lapis made it. If she hadn't, Sapphire surely would have seen her, just like she's seen everyone else who's been captured. Ruby, Pearl, Amethyst, Peridot.

Steven.

Now they're all here, being tried for treason. Steven's being tried as the leader of the rebellion, since he holds Rose's stone. Frightened as he is, he's staying strong, trying to prove he's not Rose whilst attempting to befriend everyone he meets - from his cell guard to the diamonds. Even in this stress, he seems fascinated with Homeworld and everything about it - it's alien and new to him. Amethyst shares his transfixion- she's never seen her species' planet, either. Pearl has a lesser, but still present, intrigue with the new technology. For all three, though, the interest is on the backburner - their current preoccupation is the stress and fear of the trials.

Ruby and Sapphire miss each other far too much to be bothered with things such as the newest Homeworld gadgets. They've been Garnet for so long that it was just their natural state of being, even if it was one modified from their original forms. Now they're in shock, not only trying to adjust emotionally, but also physically - like getting your land legs back after months at sea.

Even if Ruby and Sapphire don't share Pearl's interest in the technological advances, they do share her lack of guilt over their crimes. They left for the same reason Pearl did, after all - to be with the one they loved on Earth. When Rose left Homeworld for Earth, Pearl left Homeworld for Rose. Similarly, Sapphire left Homeworld for Ruby, and Ruby left Homeworld for Sapphire.

Though Pearl, Sapphire and Ruby are all technically "guilty", having committed the "crimes" they are accused of, Amethyst and Steven are not. Their similarity, in terms of guilt, to the criminal trio lies in the fact that none of them feel guilty. In the case of Amethyst and Steven, neither of them are deserters, even if everyone on Homeworld is convinced Steven is. They were of the Earth - their only crime was joining the crystal gems in order to protect their home. And that's not such a terrible thing, is it? They feel no guilt for doing what they believed was right.

Everyone is pretty much keeping it together, despite the stress.

Well.

Except for Peridot.

She's falling to pieces, terrified. The words _deserter_ and _traitor_ were still far too real for her - she had only recently left Homeworld, after all. Her entire mannerism was scared and guilty, her physical form built of flinches and jumps. She's like a child caught getting doing something wrong. She had none of the defiance that her accomplices had - she was still connected to this place, she hadn't had the time to emotionally leave it behind yet.

Even if she hates this, she feels she deserves it. She doesn't - her only "crime" was her standing up for what she, herself, thought was right; even if that meant going against what was "allowed". She was being _brave_ , not bad.

She knows Peridot sees it differently - as an inexcusable sin. And she's terrified. Sapphire doesn't blame her for the fear - she's afraid too. Afraid is such a weak word for it, but she can't think of a word that could adequately convey the cold terror that grips her chest and shakes her to her core. She's trying so hard to find a way to escape - spending all her time overclocking her future vision, testing every possibility she can think of to get them away from here. Every route she tries is a dead end. They're trapped, really and truly, from what she can see. Their punishments range from centuries of imprisonment to being shattered.

The only hope she can see, sometimes, is a flicker of another path that leads somewhere else. Before she can explore it, though, the path disappears. She doesn't know if it's a mirage, like a hallucination of land in a drowning human's mind, or if it's truly an option. After all, the future's not set in stone - things are always changing. Ruby proved that much to her after tackling her right out of the life she had known and into a life she'd never even seen as a possibility. Maybe one day someone'll shift fate enough for her to grasp the path and act upon it, for them to escape.

She hopes so (such shimmers of hopeful paths are the only things that gives her a jump of anxious, painful hope that she may see Garnet again one day, however impossible it may seem now). Until then, though, it's just them waiting for almost certain death. So yes, she can sympathize with Peridot's fear, even if she can't feel her guilt.

Even if she believes Peridot's guilt to be misplaced, she doesn't want to invalidate it. Peridot's mindset is so different, still trained to obey the diamonds. They made her, and she hasn't been gone long enough for the scarring of their brand, burned deep within her mind, to fade or even lighten. They still own her. Even when bearing the star she's finally found a place for (it's in her hair), she's still more Homeworld Gem that Crystal Gem. And that's why this is so impossibly difficult for her - she's not only guilty of all the things they blame her of, but she feels the guilt for it, as well. She feels she deserves to be punished. To Sapphire, however, the sassy, spunky,  _sweet_ Peridot couldn't possibly deserve such torture. It seems such a extreme reaction to breaking laws that seems so insanely draconian - almost as if breathing was outlawed under threat of execution.

Sapphire is different from Peridot, though. Her diamond's branding mark on her mind has fully healed, faded, disappeared. In it's place has grown a wonderful, healing idea in the shape of a star, the design splashed across the clothes of a woman with two hearts beating as one. She's left this life behind long ago, she no longer cared about any mission that she was supposed to be on, about some fortune telling of rebels that she had been sent to do thousands of years ago. She wasn't absent of loyalty - her loyalty had just changed; shifted to the Earth. It had broken away from the diamonds when she had taken Ruby's arm and ran. It had swung in an arc, turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and come to rest with the Crystal Gems when Garnet had stitched a bit of the universe to her outfit; covered her chest and each gauntlet with a star.

A little bit of the cosmos with her, always. Now the only time she sees the stars is when she watches the constellations of Homeworld slide across the night sky, the sight fractured by the bars of her cell window.

She does just that right now and wishes, not for the first or last time, that she still had the stars on her outfit. She reaches a small hand through the bars, as if she could reach out and pull one from the sky and stitch it to her dress.

She flexes her fingers, reaching further, pushing up on her toes and straining her arm until her shoulder is flush against the metal. Moving herself as far as she can towards the brightest, bluest star - no, planet - that she sees in the sky.

Reaching from this twisted nightmare towards her home.


End file.
